• Question: What is your favourite telescope?

    Asked by 944sptm25 to Angus, Christine, Guy, Hermine, Ollie on 8 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Hermine Schnetler

      Hermine Schnetler answered on 8 Mar 2018:

      My favourite telescope is the South African Large Telescope. The reason for this is because it is a telescope made in South Africa for South Africa! 🙂

    • Photo: Guy Rixon

      Guy Rixon answered on 8 Mar 2018:

      Gaia (see http://gaia.ac.uk/) is the best one I’ve worked with. And the most expensive, by a large margin.

      I am still very fond of the Issac Newton Telescope (INT) on La Palma. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton_Telescope (general stuff) and http://www.ing.iac.es/Astronomy/telescopes/int/index.html (detail for astronomers). I did my first professional observing on the INT as a graduate student back in 1987. Later, it was the first telescope where I did good work in engineering: I rebuilt the control system for the digital cameras.

    • Photo: Angus Gallie

      Angus Gallie answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      My two maybe equal favourites are still to start doing science! The James Webb Space telescope, which I worked on will be launched in 2019. Right now I’m working on The European Extremely Large Telescope, which will be pointed to the sky in 2024. This combination of the biggest and best ground and space telescopes will deliver ground-breaking science. I guess for telescopes working right now, I’ve got a soft spot for VISTA (on Hawaii) which was the first one I worked on.

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